VBA Introduction

Welcome to Visual Basic for Applications. This introduction should provide an overview of VBA but also check out the links in the "Introduction" section in the site navigation sidebar.

What is VBA?

VBA is a high-level, interpreted, static and dynamically typed, multi-paradigm, scripting language developed by Microsoft. VBA was a dialect of Visual Basic 6 but received an update to version 7 after VB6 was discontinued. VBA is embedded into Microsoft Office applications and a number of other applications developed by other companies. VBA is most often used for automation of tasks within the host application but can be used for general scripting purposes. VBA is a very powerful language within its domain but is limited outside of its domain when compared to more general purpose languages. VBA is often used in the fields of business, finance, data analysis, engineering, and sciences. VBA is often closely connected with Microsoft Excel and is currently the quickest, simplest, most convenient way to interact programmatically with Excel. Distributing VBA solutions is often as simple as sending a macro-enabled file to another user. VBA is in the BASIC language family which is intended to be easy to learn for beginners; BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

Where does VBA stand?

Most programmers from a computer science background do not use VBA as a primary language. While VBA is not a favorite in the programming community it is arguably a great language to learn. Basic syntax is mostly clean, simple, English-like, intuitive, and human readable; albeit somewhat verbose. Basic syntax is arguably better than C-style syntax and whitespace-based syntax in some ways, but programmers tend to prefer what they are familiar with. VBA provides clear opening and closing of code blocks along with intuitive constructs such as the Select Case statement and the With statement which other languages may lack. Despite VBA being such a beginner-friendly, useful, and well-structured language it was ranked the most dreaded programming language from 2019-2020 on StackOverflow. Although VBA may be among the most dreaded languages, VBA has a large community from a diverse background across numerous industries and is highly productive in the workplace. VBA may not be the right tool for every project, but it is often the right tool for automating work, manipulating data, and making life easier.

Who should use VBA?

VBA can be useful to a wide variety of people but some of the most common VBA users are:

  • Office Workers
  • Financial Analysts
  • Accountants
  • Data Analysts
  • Scientists
  • Engineers
  • People that want to learn programming

VBA Common Use Cases

VBA has many uses but some of the most common use cases include:

  • Automation
  • Data Manipulation
  • Scripting
  • Creating User-Defined Functions
  • Extending the Functionality of Applications

Future of VBA

Microsoft has no plans to develop Visual Basic or VBA in the future. Microsoft has been developing Office Scripts which is a TypeScript-based web-enabled scripting environment for office applications that is portable across platforms. Although VBA does not appear to be the wave of the future, it will probably remain productive and be supported into the future. Because VBA is easy to learn, VBA solutions are easy to distribute, VBA is widely used, there is a lot of existing VBA code, and Windows operating systems makes up most of the OS market.